David Wahl on Creativity and Marketing

Love your ideas

Sure, you love your good ideas and the ideas that make you money and the ideas that make you laugh, but do you love all your ideas?

Whatever that mysterious force inside us is that lets us connect things together in a way they never have been before, well, that force doesn’t know if an idea is good or not. It just pumps out idea after idea, spraying them all over the place in an endless geyser.

The only way to stop this force is to tell it it’s doing a bad job. To tell it that it’s not making sense and couldn’t it come up with something more useful?

It doesn’t even have to be you saying it, someone else telling you that your idea is stupid can do it. In fact, hearing someone else being told their idea is stupid can shut it off if you aren’t careful.

When that happens the geyser dries up and we find ourselves begging it to start back up again. We just need an idea, any idea, but all we get is a bunch of dust and nothing.

Here’s a way to get around that.

Love every idea you have for just a moment. No matter how silly, stupid or how many copyrights it breaks, just smile and enjoy your idea before you let it go.

I’m not saying that you have to pretend it’s a good idea, just that you enjoy it. Smile it at it. If it’s good, write it down or say it out loud. If it’s bad, just enjoy it like you would a bad movie or a child’s joke.

Every idea thinks it deserves to be enjoyed and loved.

In fact, why not go one step further than just enjoying the idea and actually add to the bad idea. If it occurs to you that the mechanical horses in front of grocery stores should be transformed into highway-ready ecologically friendly vehicles, don’t toss it aside as unworkable. Instead, start designing a way to hold all the rolls of quarters you’re going to need to get to work and back.

Let your ideas start to get connected, then you won’t have to release them. They become part of a web to build a better idea. Instead of throwing things away, you’re using them as a foundation for something else.

Appreciate, smile, enjoy and cherish every single idea you have. Just don’t act on all of them.

Do this and they’ll keep coming.

In fact, you’ll have so many ideas they might start to get irritating.

Not to you, but to all the jealous people around you who struggle to have any idea, even a bad one.